A former adviser to resource giants Uralkali and Hess, who was once dubbed a “God of finswimming”, has become the latest ex-Goldman Sachs banker to join a business linked to Hong Kong trading house Noble Group.

Russian-born Konstantin Koudriaev recently started at the agriculture arm of Noble Group as global head of business development and M&A, according to people familiar with the matter.

The agricultural arm he has joined, Noble Agri, is due to become a joint venture between Noble and Chinese grain trader COFCO. A COFCO-led consortium agreed to pay $1.5 billion for a 51% stake in the business in April this year. The deal, which is expected to close shortly, will see Noble Group left with a 49% stake in the joint venture.

Koudriaev joined Goldman Sachs in 2006 after spending four years at Morgan Stanley, also in London. He was promoted to the rank of managing director in 2011 but left the US bank in December 2013.

An M&A specialist in the natural resources group, Koudriaev worked on large deals for Goldman Sachs. He advised Russian potash fertiliser company Uralkali on its more than $10 billion merger with Silvinit in 2010 and, more recently, advised Hess on the $2 billion sale of its Russian unit to Lukoil.

Koudriaev will join a growing list of ex-Goldman Sachs bankers at Noble Group. Chief executive Yusuf Alireza joined in 2012 after 19 years at the US bank, where he had worked in London before taking a role as co-president of Asia, ex-Japan.

Other Goldman Sachs alumni in senior positions at the group include Nigel Robinson, the ex-global head of natural resources M&A at Deutsche Bank who spent eight years at Goldman Sachs, and Giovanni Serio, ex-European head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs and now group head of research at Noble.

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As well as forging a highly successful career in finance, Koudriaev is a big name in finswimming. The sport involves competitors putting on a monofin and racing over similar distances to swimming races. Koudriaev has 15 world championships to his name and previously held the world finswimming records over 200m and 400m. He was last year described as a “God of finswimming” by one fan on the Finswimmer Magazine website.

Goldman Sachs is no stranger to hiring talented athletes. In a recent sports day at the firm’s London office, partner Steve Windsor said that the problem with Goldman Sachs was that “You say: ‘Have you played table tennis before?’ And they say: ‘Yes, a little bit, I used to play for my country’”.

Noble Group, known by some as mini-Glencore, started out as a commodities trading firm, but has since expanded to have a greater presence in the commodities supply chain. Late last year, it agreed to invest $500 million in X2 Resources, the private mining venture set up by ex-Xstrata boss Mick Davis. More recently, it launched a $2 billion joint venture with private equity firm EIG Global Energy Partners to buy energy assets around the world.